It is important for organisations and individuals to control their documents and other digital works. For some industries this may be a legal requirement. Computer implemented document management systems (DMS) provide document storage, tracking, backup, security, update histories and access control of documents and other digital works such as software code, audio and video files.
A DMS may store each document or other digital asset in its native format so that it may be created and edited by a particular software package (e.g. a word processor). However, instead of local or network storage of the document, a dedicated data store is used. Whilst each item or document may be stored securely or even encrypted, once a document has been retrieved by an author or editor it can be relatively simple to forward the document on to another party outside of the DMS. For example, a text document may be retrieved from the DMS by a registered user and forwarded as an email attachment to a different user outside of the control of the DMS. Even if the recipient is entitled to access to the document, any updates or changes that they may make will be lost as they will be made to a copy outside of the definitive version stored within the DMS. If the recipient is not an authorised user then this can also represent a security breach.
Password protecting individual documents can be cumbersome and easy to defeat as the password protection may be removed before the file is sent or the password may be sent with the document itself.
Another method of securing documents is to prevent them from being opened or edited in their native format and instead accessed or browsed within a proprietary application that is part of or associated with the DMS. However, this can be inconvenient for the end users and require additional computing resources for the DMS to run this functionality.
Therefore, there is required a method and system that overcomes these problems.